Jean Halloran

Key Player

Director, The Consumer Policy Institute (of Consumers Union of the United States); Former staff researcher, President’s (Carter) Council on Environmental Quality; Former research director, INFORMSince 1982, Jean Halloran has been the director of the Consumer Policy Institute, a division of Consumers Union, best known for publishing Consumer Reports magazine. Together with co-worker Michael Hansen, Halloran has bitterly complained to the international press about supposed safety lapses in the United States’ food supply (especially concerning genetically modified organisms, or GMOs).

Promoting the Organic Consumers Association’s view that only draconian warning labels can protect the public from these so-called “Frankenfoods,” she told Multinational Monitor (a publication of Ralph Nader’s “Essential Information” group) that the American food-safety regulatory framework was “a mess” and predicted that it “is never going to succeed.” In an April 1999 statement to the Reuters news service, she said of the United States that “our government claims that we have this wonderful regulatory system which guarantees the environmental and health safety of GMOs. In our view, these claims are a fraud.”